← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
SEO Jobs Week - What is happening in the SEO Job Market
00:29:10
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- [00:00]
Ben Jayshaph
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice. Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything.
- [00:27]
Nick Leroy
Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts.
- [00:32]
Ben Jayshaph
Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom.
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Nick Leroy
Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton.
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Tyson Stockton
Hey, what's going on? This is Tyson from pre visible IO and joining me today is Nick Leroy, founder of SEOjobs.com and also freelance consultant@nickleroyconsulting.com and this week we have a special set of episodes for you. We're going to be doing the SEO Jobs week on the Voice of Search, where SEO Jobs, Nick and I, we partnered together to put together, in my mind, probably one of the most like exhaustive SEO reports on the SEO job market. And we're going to break down each aspect of the report into an episode this week. And without further ado, I'm going to bring on Nick. So, Nick, welcome to the podcast.
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Nick Leroy
Hey, Tyson, thanks so much for the interview or the opportunity.
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Tyson Stockton
No, I mean, you had previously done in a state of SEO jobs, and I think I was massaging, kind of like playing around with the idea at the time, so we were able to kind of connect. And you know, in my mind, I feel like we're kind of helping carry the torch that you started last year with kind of that Q1 report where this year, you know, we wanted to do it across like the entire kind of 20, 24 calendar year. But maybe just to start off with the listeners, like kind of what's. What's kind of your personal motivation behind doing some of these work and some of this efforts?
- [02:08]
Nick Leroy
Yeah, so I have kind of a fun story. Well, fun now, not fun back then, but I have been doing SEO for 15 years. I was 10 years agency side and I had lost my job at one point in time. And then the job that I got right after I lost that job due to Covid. And what this did is it put me in a position where I was obviously seeking employment, but I was stuck going to Indeed and Monster and Career Builder, all these sites that are just massive and SEO plays like not even 1% of their efforts. So as I always tell people, go to indeed or LinkedIn type in SEO and I bet you within that first page, you're going to find jobs for, like, developers. And the only reason it's showing up is because there's a bullet point that says SEO. Nice to know you know, something along those lines. So with all that, like I said, I'm very passionate about being put in a situation where you need to seek employment. And I just felt like this was a really big gap in our industry. Again, having been around for 15 years, we just don't talk about, we don't talk about salary, we don't talk about what it takes to be promoted, we don't talk about going freelance because we're very tactical in the how to rank, how to drive traffic, how to convert. So, long story short, that's where the opportunity to acquire the domain SEO jobs came in. And it's just been kind of a day in, day out, you know, just little bit of effort, trying to give back. And again, if it helps just even one person kind of avoid some of the pain that I had to go through, totally worth it, 100%.
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Tyson Stockton
And I feel like it, it feels a bit serendipitous to, you know, connect with you. Like, we were kind of, you know, going in a similar direction, coming at it from different angles. And I think, you know, from our side, Pre Visible, like, personally, I felt kind of the challenges in hiring for SEO, where if it's an outside recruiting firm, they may not have the knowledge of nuance of SEO to like, help find the right individuals, internal HR teams, it was also a little bit too far removed. And so even though it's not, you know, the lion's share of the business at Pre Visible is something that we felt that was important to offer as like a service, to kind of bridge that. And so from our side, from the service, from your side with the platform, it feels like it's a great combination. And I'm really excited to have kind of our first joint study, you know, get out there in the wild. And I think one of the things that really makes this study different is how far we went within it, rather than just kind of hitting on the total number of jobs because there's so many nuances and so much within our industry that looking at the top level, like these are the total number of jobs available, I feel like can be really misleading and at the end of the day is not that useful for other SEOs looking for work or to progress their careers. So I think that was something that was like, really important for the approach to the study is to get beyond just the total volume Yeah, I couldn't.
- [05:28]
Nick Leroy
Agree with you anymore just because like you had said, I did that Q1 of 2024, but it really was high level. It was like total amount of jobs versus total amount of jobs at this point and really didn't go in and paint the entire picture. I think we felt relatively confident in saying that the industry was a little bit more difficult to navigate versus the previous year for employment. But that was kind of the real takeaway. But like you said, first attempt you had reached out. It's like, how do we make this even better? We have a better set of data. We have so many more insights and I think that this next one that everyone's going to take a look at, it's just going to blow my old one out of the water.
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Tyson Stockton
I mean it's just like it's iterations, you know, it's like each time we try to, you know, introduce something new and kind of push the envelope a little bit. And I think one of the things that we'll get into later in the week, but also I think it's good to just set the stage is like there's a huge challenge with job posting duplication. And we've seen, you know, post pandemic there being this rise of remote jobs and there's been this really obnoxious habit of employers posting the same jobs in multiple cities and kind of just almost flooding the market with the same posting where you might have, you know, when we would detect 100 different job postings. But really like when you read between the lines, it's one role. Like it's one position. It's not 100, it's just one remote position that they posted 100 times in different cities.
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Nick Leroy
Right. It's not a hospital looking to hire 25 nurses. It's the same role, maybe different floors. This is one role. And really they already have an idea of who they want too. But I digress.
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Tyson Stockton
Yeah, and, and I think like, like that was just such a significant piece though because you know, we detected and hit a ton of different jobs. But when we boiled it down, we came down to roughly like, you know, around like 6,000 unique. And so across like the entire 2024 calendar year, we came down to the being that many kind of like unique roles and within. And it was around 3300 kind of like unique employers that were hiring for it. So obviously large organizations gonna hire more than one role throughout the year. So there's makes sense where you'd have less employers than unique job postings. But I think if we're wanting to get to what's the health of the industry, we also have to get to unique jobs. Not just the number of postings. And especially when we looked over the course of last year, having this kind of shift of remote hybrid on site, that's going to play into maybe how inflated things might seem if you're looking at a non deduped version of this.
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Nick Leroy
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that was in full transparency. One of the issues that I had even when I put the original report together was so much information, but just de duping it so that you felt like the data was at least sound and being able to share how you approached it. And that's arguably the hardest part of this entire report.
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Tyson Stockton
Well, and two, it's like anytime you're looking at this type of data, I feel like you can also have a different perspective in how you interpret it because there is like the hard numbers and what we're able to identify, but then the way that we look at it, I think through your and my conversations, like sometimes like we may have been looking at similar data points and kind of been slightly interpreting in a different way. And it was like we were kind of joking around that I was like. And I guess it's like contrary to my instinctual habit, but like normally I would instinctually be on the pessimistic, you know, conservative, pragmatic side. But in how I looked at a lot of the report, I was feeling more optimistic of it. And I think you were coming across with an interpretation of like, you know, greater challenge and like, hey, it's a tough, tough market right now.
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Nick Leroy
Yeah.
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Tyson Stockton
So maybe like you can also share a little bit with the listeners. Kind of just like, overall, how are you feeling about the market? How did you take the numbers from the study?
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Nick Leroy
Yeah, so I love that question. And like you said, I have my thoughts. Everybody has their own. Not one is right or wrong. But as you had mentioned, I'm a little bit pessimistic right now. I'm not going to lie. I mean, again I mentioned before, I've been doing this for 15 years and this is the very first time that Google has ever put me in a position where I feel like, will my job exist in 15 years? And that doesn't mean am I employable or can I switch? But what is the state of organic search? You know, we know that all these SERPs are changing consistently. We know the AI overviews are creating more and more zero clicks and you know, ChatGPT and all these other LLMs I think we're at the point where SEO used to be an opportunity for everybody to have a fair chance at, you know, the organic or free, if you will, traffic. That isn't the case anymore today. So investing in SEO is no longer an obvious choice for every company and every website. So, long story short with that, I think because of that, we naturally are going to have less opportunity to practice our tactics, everything that we've been doing over the years. So my concern is we have AI that's going to help us scale. People are going to err on the side of trying to use it as a silver bullet for cheap or free SEO resources. That's going to have an impact on jobs, especially on the entry level. And then I think we're going to have just bigger issues with attribution, because a lot of us, we measure SEO success from kind of a default channel equals organic search. And I think that we are at a spot in our industry where we need to pivot kind of how we continue to define success. And again, I'm being long winded right now. But the point being is there's so many factors that are up for debate, change, you know, that I think people are going to be afraid to invest, whether that be hiring in house, you know, paying an agency, or working with a consultant like myself. What do you think?
- [12:18]
Tyson Stockton
I think in particular, that last piece really hits home where it's like, there's no way around it. Like, I do agree in the sense that where there's a hesitancy in the market, where there's like, kind of this, like, uncertainty of how things are going to play out, I think there's a ton of nuance into what's going on in the market. And I think the tougher world component, I think, and you know, you said especially on the entry level, I see that being tougher, for sure. I see, like, some areas of, like, opportunity with this. And so I think as the industry is getting more and more complex, there's some, and I think we see this in the numbers which we'll dig into later in the week. But, like, whether it's like, skill set demands, technicality, and I see some, like, increased opportunities there, you see other areas where you have even more highlights of this uncertainty and kind of like, let's be a little hesitant or, you know, rethink this maybe, and no way around, it's like we see that more in the content realm. So I think that's something to kind of call out. But as far as, like, the total number of, like, Unique jobs that we saw is in some ways like to me it follows some macroeconomic pieces. And I should have grounded earlier in the conversation like we were looking at just US jobs. We do have an interest and want to expand this globally, but kind of for this first exhaustive study, we wanted to do it on the US market. And so when we looked at it, we broke it into quarters and the hottest quarter, the quarter that there were the most jobs was in Q2. It kind of went Q2 of being the most Q1 at second Q3 and Q4. And so you do see this decreasing of jobs going into the later half of the year. But at the same time, I hate to bring it up, but political year, anytime that there's an election, you always have some kind of hesitation or uncertainty in the market. And I mean even at pre visible we felt that in having some prospect and sales conversations where companies maybe were interested but they had some reluctancy to make a decision and choice. And so when I look at kind of like the total numbers, I think it is worth recognizing these areas of caution, things like that. But I still see, I think, you know, even though it was slightly lower and there was a decline in the later part of the year, I think that's kind of similar to what we saw in the macro level. And, and being that it wasn't so, so sharp, it's like not enough yet that I'm going to like, I'm going to stay the course, so to speak. And I may pick my lane as far as like, which I want to lean into. And I think that's the context that I would hope the rest of the week kind of provides the listeners is like, hey, yeah, there's areas of concern, there's areas that we need to be cautious of. And I would agree too that it's a buyer's market as far as I guess SEO hiring goes. But there's also some silver lining. There's some positive elements. It's not like we're seeing a complete fallout of jobs. So it's like, especially in Q4, like the hesitation we saw, I'm actually expecting to see more of a kind of a rebound going into Q2. And I'm hoping when we do the comparison of Q2 last year to Q2 this year, we'll see another kind of like rise or increase. But you know, time will tell.
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Nick Leroy
Yeah, so that's what I, I'm hoping to Tyson, like I said, I, I do have kind of the negative twist on this and the only asterisks I throw on. Everything that you've said is a lot of this data that we're comparing is pre aios. So it's like where we had kind of, you know, what I would say, yesteryear's, you know, SEO challenge. And this year, you know, I can't speak for your clients, but a lot that I'm working with when it comes to educational queries, they're down like 20% year over year. And it's undoubtedly from AIOS.
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Tyson Stockton
And I think that's a huge piece that we have to accept as SEOs, is we are at this confluence where the industry is shifting. I mean, you kind of hit it on it earlier where it's like, we need to rethink how we're communicating success, how, you know, we're evangelizing SEO in the industry. And there's a lot of tactical layers. I think, again, maybe like glass Half Full feels weird for me to be the glass half full guy, but Glass Half full, I'd say, hey, like, everybody under the sun knows about this topic of LLMs and generative AI. Like, you have people that are outside of the SEO world asking about these things that we have experience as SEOs in. And so I think as a industry, as a professional, we're well suited to take advantage of that and use it to have a louder voice within the organization and, you know, claim that seat at the table, if you will, which is not an easy feat. And there's a lot that goes into that. But I think, like, there is this, like, groundswell happening in a very tight competitive market that if played the right way, you can take advantage of it.
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Nick Leroy
So here's. I actually agree with you. So here's going to be Nick half full, because I do agree on that. I think education, while always incredibly important for SEO since day one, I mean, we just need to literally 10x that. I mean, being able to communicate, educate, learn, but also, like, help our clients pivot and see the value of all of that is going to be so incredible. The other really optimistic thing that I have is I have believed, for better words or not, that the SEO industry has gone fat. And what I mean by that is we've never had a barrier of entry. Anybody can be an SEO. You gotta have a keyboard, gotta have a monitor and maybe that back end to a website, right? And you're an SEO. If there's anything that I feel confident about is that in 2025, it's gonna be the death of like, cookie cutter or checkbox SEO. And I think what that's gonna do is that's gonna limit the amount of profitability for some individuals and they're gonna exit our industry. And I think what that's going to do is it's going to allow those of us who stick around again learn pivot test. I think we're going to be in a much better spot, you know, come this time next year.
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Tyson Stockton
That's a really good point. And I think like with that or kind of like expanding from there, I think that's also for those reasons, like that's why you're going to see, you know, a tighter, more competitive space on the entry level. Like no way around it. I do think it's a harder industry to break into right now than it was five, ten years ago.
- [19:33]
Nick Leroy
Well, Tyson, I won't speak for you, but when I started off like I was doing redirect mapping by hand, I was writing title tags by the hundreds of meta descriptions, all of these things, like there is no doubt, there's no argument, like I can do it better and they can do it faster. What I think everyone has to excel in now is that creative thinking and critical thinking, those are things that, you know, machines can never do. But I don't think it's necessarily reasonable to ask someone right out of college or you know, a couple years of being a professional to be able to jump into that. Those are things that you and I got five, 10 years before we had to jump into almost the business aspect of it.
- [20:18]
Tyson Stockton
And I think, and that's, that's where you see this like tightening of competition on the entry level roles. And as, I mean actually tomorrow when we'll dive into this a little bit more like, I think there are ways of like where you're looking, knowing that that's a tighter, more competitive area. The other side of like the positive is I feel like there's also greater recognition from the larger organizations of the role and the need. And so you see like the higher level roles, even though it's a much smaller quantity in looking at the overall number of job opportunities, there are more director and above roles than we saw kind of historically. So it's like there's that recognition. But you know, certainly especially in an enterprise organization, you might have a team of 10 SEOs, there's only going to be probably one VP if it's large enough or director level kind of SEO specific role. So it's like competition's there, but it is increasing. I think the, the final piece that I'd want to touch on too is just like data collection for this. As far as where should people be looking for these jobs, we use Google Search for this. So SEO, like, we're familiar with crawling and scraping Data. So across 2024, we crawled and scraped Google job search. From that, we identify the actual job posting and then we're able to scrape the job description to then cluster and, you know, parse that data into something that was more usable. And so an example of this would be not every job is going to say stakeholder management, but they're going to have bullet points and things around that. So the ability to cluster things, to be more representative and looking across the board, I think is really critical. But it's also like we went with Google Search because like, we came across almost like over 4000 different sources of it. Because you have individual websites that are in this, the big, the big four. And I mean, by far the largest was LinkedIn. So it's like if you have to pick one place of where to go, I mean, and take a Google job search, but if you're in the thing, LinkedIn is going to be kind of the biggest bang for the buck. But then like the big four was LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, indeed, Glassdoor. So those were the most common, where we had identification of the most unique jobs. But then that cascades down across literally thousands of different sites because obviously the bigger players are going to also put it on their own jobs. You have enterprise solutions like Workday, et cetera. So it's like there's a ton of places where people post jobs. And so I think like the takeaway to the user to this is like, don't be stagnant into just one location. Look around to a variety of areas. And biggest shout out, go to seojobs.com for moving away from a lot of the clutter and kind of noise that we have in the industry.
- [23:25]
Nick Leroy
Yeah, I mean, everything that you said I can't echo enough. I was just looking at my previous report, you know, and I was just saying that it's like 4700 employers published just in the year 2023 and 2024 through March. So it's, it's a big pool. And I can't emphasize enough the effort that was put into de duping. I mean, the job space is literally the only area where duplication of the exact same content is actually a good thing because it gives you more reach and more visibility.
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Tyson Stockton
And you also see wild things in some of these job postings where it's like you're sifting through A bunch of noise. As far as, like, you know, depending on which state a job is posted, there's different legal compliance requirements of what is posted with that. You have a lot of states. California, great, it's going to do that. However, there's no. There's not as much saying the quality piece. So it's like we did see sometimes salary bands, and I'm sure we'll jump into this on Friday. But, like, we saw salary bands that were like a wider range than the bottom of that salary band. So literally we saw something that had a salary band range over $250,000, which is the applicant. That's useless.
- [24:51]
Nick Leroy
Yeah, absolutely. And Tyson, you know this just from us talking, but I have two, like, unofficial rules. As the person who's running SEO jobs, I don't post jobs where you ask people to work for free, because I don't believe in that. And I don't post jobs where you have zero or, you know, $40,000 entry level to VP, 300,000. Like, if you're putting a number there to be legally compliant, that's already like, literally the first red flag a company can show.
- [25:19]
Tyson Stockton
100%. And I think, like, that integrity is so critical in this area. Like, we all fell into SEO from one direction or another. And I think part of both of our motivations in putting time into this area is one, it's a way also to contribute back to the community effort to it. And I think, like, there's a level of knowledge sharing that exists in the industry and also give a shout out to Noah and the SEO community for kind of helping create a little bit of, you know, like, the space and the platform for this. But in the same way that we share openly our tactics and our tricks and tips and what, you know, because no one goes to school for this, like, we all learn from each other. And so I think in that same vein is exactly why we wanted to make, you know, kind of these contributions and these efforts to give SEOs kind of more awareness and more information to help kind of navigate, you know, their own personal career progression.
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Nick Leroy
Yeah, and I'll just add on to that. We already talked earlier. You know, the state of the economy, especially in the tech sector. You know, layoffs are very common. Q4, all the way through Q1, it seems like every day I log into LinkedIn and I'm seeing somebody say they're now open to work. You know, so I think that being able to provide some of this data, again, as somebody who is in between roles for various reasons, hopefully this data, like just allows you to put, you know, just data behind the real situation. Like it's not necessarily you or if it is you, like here is some of the data points to suggest on what you can work on. Like it's actionable. And you know, I just think that hopefully it'll incentivize you to keep pushing forward, find those next opportunities 100%.
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Tyson Stockton
You know, if you are looking, this area is give me a shout. Give Nick a shout. Like, I think I speak for both of us where, you know, we're both willing and we want to make that extra effort to kind of help the others. But with that, that's going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. If you'd like to get more information on Nick and SEO jobs, be sure to check out his LinkedIn profile in their show notes and also go on over and check out seojobs.com where you can find all the top open SEO jobs. As mentioned, we're going to be doing an episode every single day this week on the SEO Job study. So each day we're going to give a little bit more and kind of dig a little bit deeper into the report. So tomorrow we're going to be diving into roles and titles.
- [28:05]
Ben Jayshaph
Okay, thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes. You can contact him on Twitter, where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. Just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is Voice of search on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben Jayshaph B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the.